What is a Negative Keyword?

7Search advertisers have an option to match keywords using “Broad”, “Phrase”, and "Exact" matching. Negative keywords help prevent your ad from appearing for search terms that are unrelated to your website. To help you identify which negative keywords to add to your account, the Detailed Keyword Report contains the original searched keyword that resulted in the click.

For example: If your ad sells new plasma tvs and you have specified "plasma tv" as a keyword, by specifying "used" as a negative keyword you can prevent your ad from being shown when searches are made on "used plasma tv".

You can specify negative keywords at the following levels:

Account Level - Negative keywords will apply to all campaigns within your advertising account. For example, if none of your campaigns promote "free" products, you can add the negative keyword "free" at the Account Level and it will apply to all of your campaigns.

Campaign Level - Negative keywords will apply only to the campaign in which they are specified.

Limits - In order for the 7Search system to be able to deliver ads within fractions of a second, advertisers will have a limit of 100 negative keywords per account and 100 negative keywords per each campaign.

Additionally, when a search is made on a longer search phrase (typically more than 4 - 5 words), the negative keyword function may be unable to check each of the words in the phrase against the negative keyword list. This, however, should happen very infrequently.

You can define your negative keywords by clicking on the "Negative Keywords" link in the blue bar on the Campaigns tab.

*Note* on Negative keywords & Click-Free (cf) keywords - Negative keywords apply only when a [keyword] search has been performed. Since cf keywords are based on direct links and are NOT search based, their results are not affected by negative keywords.